"This is a very strange business and a very strange endeavor of life," Steve Jobs once said in a candid interview about his legacy in 1994. "All the work that I have done in my life will be obsolete by the time that I am 50."

At the time, Jobs was on the cusp of turning 40. The devices he'd work on to that point, mostly personal computers, would indeed be largely obsolete a decade later. By the time that happened though, Jobs was already ushering in a new era of gadgets: the iPod, iPhone and iPad, which helped change the way consumers relate to electronics and communicate with one another.

These products will certainly be rendered obsolete one day as well, either by advancements at Apple or another company. For better or worse, the same can't be said about the legacy of Steve Jobs.

Jobs passed away on Oct. 5, 2011 at the age of 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Three years later, Jobs continues to be a force in our culture. He has been the subject of books, graphic novels and movies in the time since he passed away. His name is mentioned in countless management and marketing publications. Politicians, musicians and business leaders — even some competitors — drop his name in public appearances.

The Steve Jobs brand is as strong as ever and in his absence, many are eager to attach themselves to it.

"Basically Steve Jobs is a mega great brand that is available for free and who doesn’t want to grab that?," says Sydney Finkelstein, associate dean for executive education at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "It's available for the taking."

And so it is that you hear Google's chairman Eric Schmidt call out Steve Jobs as his "hero" at an event this week. Never mind the fact that Jobs had a fierce rivalry with Google — and accused Schmidt of using his insider knowledge on the Apple board to help kickstart Android — or that Schmidt leveled criticisms against Apple and its current CEO, Tim Cook, at the same event.

You hear Republican politicians like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich tout Steve Jobs as a business icon and a "good capitalist." Never mind the fact that Jobs distrusted the GOP and repeatedly offered to help President Obama's election campaigns.

The power and allure of the Steve Jobs brand transcends political party lines and old business rivalries. It also increasingly transcends the nuances of Jobs' actual life.

"He's become shorthand for innovation and for corporate success," says Gautam Mukunda, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School and author of Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter. "We create the image of someone who maybe isn’t exactly who he really was."

You can hear this in the titles of some of the books that have come out since Jobs' death: Steve Jobs: American Genius, Steve Jobs: Genius by Design, Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Keep, and Nurture Talent and Leading Apple With Steve Jobs: Management Lessons From a Controversial Genius.

The takeaway from these and other works is clear enough: Jobs was a business and technology genius. Someone with flaws, yes, but someone whose success holds important clues for how others can be successful in business, technology and perhaps life.

"We can absolutely learn from a person like that, but we have to do it very carefully. For someone like Jobs, it's easy to learn the wrong lessons — lessons that are actually really dangerous," Mukunda says.

For example, he says, you might learn that Jobs' was harsh and mercurial with his employees — but viewed through the framework of Steve Jobs The Genius, you might come to believe there's an argument for behaving similarly. But, Mukunda asks, "was he successful because of his awful ways or in spite of them?"

Even now, industry watchers we spoke with say the mainstream narrative about Jobs appears to have shaved off some of his less flattering and more complicated decisions, whether it was allegedly conspiring with other tech companies to cut down on the wags of employees, engaging in e-book price fixing or simply treating others with contempt.

"It's easy to say he did X and succeeded, so therefore I should do X, not understanding there were 100 other people who did X and failed miserably," Mukunda says.

While Jobs may not have wished to see his name used as shorthand for politicians and business leaders to market themselves, he did play a role in shaping his brand posthumously by working closely with writer Walter Isaacson on a biography, which was released shortly after his death.

Finkelstein says the Isaacson book "probably discourages competition for a period of time from other biographers" because it is viewed as authoritative. That said, he expects new details about Jobs to come out eventually, which may shape and shift the Steve Jobs narrative.

"The narrative of the Steve Jobs legacy will certainly change over time. There will be a whole new discussion about Steve Jobs in light of new evidence," Finkelstein says. "But until that happens, there will be a continual simplifying."

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